Re: How many of you have regretted buying the Epic?

@ poteen...

Did I ever said it 100% effective GPS? No... So stop talking out of your a$$... I said how to make it work... I know the problem with the GPS... And even with the problem, sprint navigator works almost fine except for maybe been 70 or 80 feet of the target because of the GPS lock bug...

Re: How many of you have regretted buying the Epic?

I use a running app with gps maping and it is accurate enough to see which side of the street I was running on. If your GPS is really only getting within 98 feet, you are going through the woods, downtown, using an inaccurate app, or your phone needs to be fixed. I can usually get a gps lock in about 15 seconds and would say accuracy is probably within 10 feet, at least on my epic, from my experience.

Re: How many of you have regretted buying the Epic?

J_A_B wrote:

I use a running app with gps maping and it is accurate enough to see which side of the street I was running on. If your GPS is really only getting within 98 feet, you are going through the woods, downtown, using an inaccurate app, or your phone needs to be fixed. I can usually get a gps lock in about 15 seconds and would say accuracy is probably within 10 feet, at least on my epic, from my experience.

There are known bugs in the Epic GPS (that is, known to the user community, although Sprint does not acknowledge them publicly). The bogus error estimate of 98 feet (30 meters) is one of those bugs.

Note: The bug is in the estimated accuracy being reported. The actual accuracy is typically much better, once the other bugs in satellite locking are overcome.

Re: How many of you have regretted buying the Epic?

I use the Sporty Pal Pro app for running, the google map that it produces is very accurate.

Sprint nav was never very accurate on my old phone(instinct), It did the same things that you guys are talking about, I missed turns all the time. I havn't left town since I bought my epic, so I havn't had a reason to use navigation with this phone yet.

Re: How many of you have regretted buying the Epic?

J_A_B wrote:

I use the Sporty Pal Pro app for running, the google map that it produces is very accurate.

Sprint nav was never very accurate on my old phone(instinct), It did the same things that you guys are talking about, I missed turns all the time. I havn't left town since I bought my epic, so I havn't had a reason to use navigation with this phone yet.

The Epic's GPS bug is not one of actual accuracy. There are two significant bugs:

1) Depending on individual usage patterns, the GPS can fail to achieve a satellite lock at all. This is really a problem of reliabilty, not accuracy. The symptoms to end-users are that sometimes the GPS can seem to work, sometimes not. The bug derives from the mishandling of time-sensitive cache data, so its occurence depends on such usage patterns.

A complication is that sometimes some users might achieve a partial satellite lock. (If they don't use a GPS utility such as GPS Test, they would not realize this.) The partial lock could have the effect of screwing up the accuracy of the geographic fix that is displayed in higher level apps such as mapping or navigation. The root cause in this case is not innacuracy, but the underlying satellite locking failure.

2) The estimated accuracy generated by the GPS is bogus. The device always reports to higher-level apps that its estimated accuracy is 30.0 meters (98.4 feet), instead of properly generating a dynamic estimate. This bogus estimate, possibly just an error or deliberate kludge of hard-coding what should a dynamic variable, may or may not be significant to various higher-level apps. (For example in Google Maps or My Tracks, the estimate shows up as a 30-meter circle around the map cursor) What you are describing is not this estimated accuracy, but the actual accuracy. My testing agrees with your results: If the user gets beyond the satellite-locking bug in 1), and the app ignores the bogus estimate of accuracy, the actual accuracy is pretty good.

How many of you have regretted buying the Epic?

definitely a learning cure but I'm lovin' it. If I could just figure out a way to make the bluetooth make voice activated calls and sync my Yahoo calendar instead of being forced to use Google, I'd be pretty happy

How many of you have regretted buying the Epic?

I use to love it (have it now for 5 months). Didn't really need the Froyo update, but by taking so long, and then pulling the update has me really lacking confidence in Samsung as far as future updates. HTC, Evo more specific to Sprint, seems to be a bit more experienced in the matter and I'm wishing I could swap phones now. After the OTA update my phone has a few issues it didn't have before.

Re: How many of you have regretted buying the Epic?

I have no regrets, although the reason I bought it turns out to be bogus. I thought I HAD to have a physical keyboard--couldn't imagine a phone without it. I was so wrong. The Epic's touchscreen is so great I have never once used the keyboard in the six months I've had the phone. If I had known it was possible to live without it my phone search would have been much different and I might have ended up with something else.

I solved the most egregious problem of the GPS not getting locks by following the fix that someone posted here (sorry, can't find it to post the link). However, I have objective proof that it loses lock and uses tower triangulation about 1/3 of the time. I am taking part in a study that is tracking my whereabouts 24/7. Once a day I go online to verify my locations. I am shown a map of where the GPS thought I was at a given time, and I respond with (among other things) whether or not the reading was accurate.. When it is using the GPS it is spot on, even knowing which side of the street my house is on, about 2/3 of the readings. When it loses lock it consistantly shows a location about 1/2 mile away. The consistency tells me that it is using towers, not getting random readings. I have a pretty set routine so I am sure of where I am when, so I am sure of how far off it is. Qnd, boy, does it use batteries! But then, any phone would.

The Epic is SO much better than my Instinct that it's hard to find fault with anything. Admittedly, other than the GPS to find coffee shops and the study, I use it as a phone 99% of the time, and simply don't need other features. I don't even text. I live in a 4G area so I don't mind the $10/month surcharge, either.

In the near future (when I get around to learning how to do it) I am going to start using it as a 4G broadband modem for my laptop. This will allow me to get rid of my current mobile broadband service which costs $60/month. Using the phone for broadband costs onny $30/month. I have already bought another charger to carry around with me because I know that this application is going to be power intensive. The way I figure it, if I have a plug for the laptop, I will have one for the phone.

How many of you have regretted buying the Epic?

I purchased an Epic for myself and my wife on launch day and have not regretted it. My wife loves the keyboard and the screen on the Epic. We have the leaked DK28 which works great on both phones with the GPS working better than it ever has, and the battery life has been better since switching to that. Since its working well the way it is I have no reason to make any changes, but this recent story might tempt me somewhere down the line:

How many of you have regretted buying the Epic?

I kind of regret buying it, but only after the Nexus S was released. If I had just listened to people who warned me about Samsung's extremely bad track record of software updates, I would've waited for the next Google phone. The Nexus S is extremely similar to the Galaxy S line of phones hardware-wise; actually it could be considered a Galaxy S phone itself. The BIG difference is that Google handles the development and release of Android for the phone directly; not Samsung. The Nexus S has had multiple updates of Gingerbread which keep adding more and more functionality and doesn't have nearly the amount of incredibly obvious bugs like the Galaxy S/Epic has. There are only a few conclusions to be had; that Samsung and/or Sprint is incapable of handling Android development themselves or they have simply stopped caring about the phone's upkeep after they have the customer's money.

This will come back to bite both companies hard. Not only do Android updates bring features and performance improvements, but they bring security fixes as well. Android is poised to hit the enterprise market head-on in a big way. As a person who does Netsec/Infosec for a living, I am very upset with Sprint and Samsung for the negligence they've performed on the Epic. Just a few days ago, a trojan hit the Android Market through the use of redistributed apps for free that roots and plants a backdoor into any phone it is installed on, giving the distributor of these fake apps complete command & control of a user's phone. The reported download count of these free apps were between 50-200,000 combined over 4 days. Now an attacker has control of up to 200,000 phones. Oh, it gets better. This security hole was fixed in Android 2.2.2 and doesn't exist in 2.3 at all. So Samsung/Sprint giving us 2.1.1 around 8 months late and then pulling it because of massive fail on their own part still wouldn't protect us from security threats like this.

So I guess I regret buying the phone much more than I thought I had because I just realized that Samsung/Sprint is currently selling phones which are riddled with functionality-crippling bugs as well as massive security holes without having any patch for anything.

How many of you have regretted buying the Epic?

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